


The Monster In the Impossible Halls

by mythaster



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Canon-Typical The Spiral Content (The Magnus Archives), Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, I guess - I mean I hope - it'd be nice if it measured up to Canon-Typical Spiral Content, Spoilers for 101 ig, The Distortion POV, no editing we free-write and then post like men, sort of spoilers for 187 but only if you're looking very hard and are as Michael-obsessed as I am
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:13:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27538930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mythaster/pseuds/mythaster
Summary: Grief upon grief, fear upon fear. The monster is silent but its wandering is frightful. It makes worn tracks in the carpets, wearing permanence into the halls, scarring it indelibly. It’s horrific. It’s not fair.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17





	The Monster In the Impossible Halls

**Author's Note:**

> I listened to 187 and felt a crest of Michael Shelley-related feelings the likes of which I haven't felt since 101. The Distortion called him useless and then had to kill him to keep him from tearing it down. No choice but to stan even harder.

There is a monster in the impossible halls. It has stopped screaming now but its silence is louder. The walls are a migraine shudder of a stoppered throat. 

The stomach is hungry and must be fed. But the monster shreds its meals before the stomach is nourished. Scientific precision written across walls in blood and gore, bodies left behind. Messy. It’s not supposed to be messy. Clutter and stains suggest permanence. There is no such thing as death. In the silence, the paintings on the walls weep evaporating tears. 

Grief upon grief, fear upon fear. The monster is silent but its wandering is frightful. It makes worn tracks in the carpets, wearing permanence into the halls, scarring it indelibly. It’s horrific. It’s not fair.

+

There are other throats. But this was the biggest, before it was choked. The stomach is hungry and must be fed. 

Mouths open and close, gasping, fish-like. The monster slams them shut and splinters their teeth. Their prey see dark gapes in the world and run. Sometimes a mouth opens under them and the impossible halls shiver with relief. Color twists and silvered glass shows strange shapes in the halls, brand new and unpredictable in their horror. Nourishment.

The monster starts to scream again. The carpet scars are stained red, only red, an ugly painful dullness. It’s graffiti, it’s obscene. It’s not fair.

+

It was a baby bird inside a shifting shell and it was about to hatch when it was choked. The shell shattered into pieces, tangible and hard and unnatural. The stomach went hungry as it hadn’t for so long before the monster came. 

There is someone in the impossible halls reciting passages of a story about a monster in another kind of hall, eating and blood-letting, carving down a thousand possibilities into a few sad and solid certainties. Ugly thing. Intruder. There are no heroes here. All the heroes lose their senses here. There are no swords here. All the swords turn to mirrors and potsherds and gravel and left shoes and the smell of gaseous paint on sweaty skin at midnight here. 

The only weapon the halls have against the monster is the monster’s mind, and it is so ugly and hard yet that it works against them. Monstrous thoughts and scars down purple-green-black wallpaper one passage, wet baby-blue paint still wavering in the air down another. 

The prey in the stomach follow the path of the monster. It staves off the worst of their fear, to know one single steady thing even here, in change insemicarnate. The stomach growls, promised a feast and given air and blood. 

It’s not fair.

+

The monster is hungry.

The halls twist and fractal in their waiting. The silence is becoming a constant warbling cry as though the monster has not realized its mouth is open and its hands are in its hair and its thoughts are becoming stars on the ceiling, shapes that shift across its face. Temporary tattoos. The temporary is key. It is forgetting things, though the blistering perpetual cold still follows in its wake. A wintery monster with cold starry thoughts that don’t match its earlier bloody boiling screaming.

The paintings on the walls watch, changing frames, tearing matting into messages for the prey, faces shifting and smiles returning. The monster is growing slow. Its steps falter. The halls have starved but so has the monster: it has forgotten that it can’t die of the hunger it knows but of a hunger it can’t fathom and that it will take much, much longer and it will feel much, much more pain. And the impossible halls are older than the monster can imagine.

For the first time in the hours’ worth of days or the months’ worth of seconds, depending on which clock is spinning backwards in the halls painted with pomegranates or oranges, the hallways smile. The monster’s mouth is a thin bloody line bitten through by fangs it didn’t use to have. It has at last lost its horror of the shifting of its body. It has begun to forget what having a static body was like at all.

The maps inscribed with permanence in the carpets begin to fade, scuffled away by uncertain stumbling feet, by drunkenly dancing feet. 

+

The monster stands in the mouth. It does not speak or gesture or cry. It cried once. The prey came quicker, fastidious, helpful. It stopped crying then. It simply stands, radiating awareness of its monstrousness. Somehow, that works, too.

That’s more like it.

+

The impossible halls are still haunted but the marks of the monster fade as quickly as they’re made. It makes noises to blend in with its surroundings, strange little noises with its monster vocal chords. Those will go in time, too, the sooner the better.

It watches the prey. It does nothing to increase their fear but it doesn’t matter: just the sight of it inspires fear all its own. It understands and doesn’t, accepts being run from and doesn’t, and all its frothy emotional turmoil is a heavy smoke of incense in the halls, beautiful and changeable, a mist blown by unguessable breaths of wind that come from nowhere, around a shadowed or too-bright corner.

Overpleased, the impossible halls stop watching the monster. It’s stopped fighting, after all, started feeding. And the first time its small, strange noises turn into the faint ripple of laughter, they barely notice.

+

The monster wears its smile as wallpaper and the hallways follow it now, unconcerned, distracted as before it was choked. It does not matter how they’re fed as long as they are fed and the monster feeds it well. The days it scarred their organs, their skin, with a map and stolidity - long past. Time is as meaningless as death here but they barely remember the blood now. Memory is just as edible as anything else with a lick of fear about it. And the monster was very afraid.

The stomach is hungry and must be fed, laughs the monster. And of course it’s right.

It picks and chooses. It guides the mouths to open. Ripe grapes, plump raspberries, fear like juice down the throat. The monster watches everything. Colors flit and then pass on its eyes. Its hair catches light and shadow and springs them back. It has realized it is a monster and is too monstrous to care. It only feeds. About time.

+

The mouth opens onto a dark office. The impossible hallways have eaten all its memories so that nothing remains to mark it but this is familiar anyway and the monster is suddenly quiet, watching as its prey simply walks past, nerves too jangled to notice that it is already being fed upon. Delicious. The monster is gone for such a brief moment and its laughter is so loud that the impossible hallways barely take notice.

+

They’ve grown complacent. So well-fed that they don’t care where the fear comes from or that it is coming through steady channels instead of evanescent plumes or the escheresque ballet of its own internal architecture. 

The pain and humiliation of believing that it reshaped the monster. That it could believe anything at all is an adeification, antipotheosis. 

It has made a mistake.

+

The mouth keeps opening onto an enemy. The monster has gotten too friendly with its monster friend. 

But it’s made one too many changes that will not change again, changes that unchange once made. Permanencies and abominations. The stench of intention in the carpet. Mirrors shattered, showing only reflections instead of impressions and misgiving and self-fulfilling prophecy. There are hallways where the light never shifts. There are tears in the wallpaper that will not heal or rip away, that dangle half-done and finished. Fixed. Fixed. Fixed. 

It has fed the impossible halls so well. But their affection for its monstrous beauty is proof of its poison. They have succumbed to its monster-mind. They thought they reshaped the monster but the monster has reshaped them instead, put nails in boards, planned, focused, fixed, fixed, fixed. 

And suddenly the impossible hallways are filled with the smell and they know what the smell is: an enemy. The monster’s monster friend, and the old strangler, and the stench of it on the monster, too, under the blood and screaming. It has always been a creature of something-else. No wonder it held on so long. No wonder it scratched maps that held their shape in the impossible hallways’ upholstery skin. No wonder it could do what it’s done, could be so cruel and mindful and destructive.

Thanks to the monster and its monster-mind, the impossible hallways understand, now, what rage feels like. Rage and vengeance and violence and blood. It has survived worse things than this useless little dead monster; it has survived the birthing agony of the presence of time itself. 

The monster will not survive this. They do to it what it used to do to their walls and their prey, and when they are done, there is nothing left but the memory. This is, after all, a happy story. Monsters must get what comes to them.

+

There is a creature in the impossible halls. A pet. It does not scream, not even once. It was built for smiling. 

Much better.


End file.
